by Scottie Westfall

Parallel evolution is a hell of a thing

Not the best photo, but this is golden wolf on the left and a black-backed jackal on the right. I screen-captured this image from this documentary, which was made before the big golden jackal revision that happened a few years ago.

There is still a big debate on how classify the creature formerly known as the African golden jackal. It is clearly closer to gray wolves and coyote than to the Eurasian golden jackal, but the exact closeness requires further research.

The black-backed jackal on the right is a much older species. It has been known from the fossil record in Africa for over two million years, and the wolf-coyote-golden wolf lineage last shared a common ancestor with it around 4.5 million years ago.

Depending upon when we finally determine when the golden wolf diverged from the modern gray wolf, it may have evolved from larger ancient gray wolves that adapted to fit the generalist jackal-like niche, or it may have evolved from a African population of Canis mosbachensis.

The black-backed jackal is derived from the earliest wolf-like canids to have entered the Old World from North America. Those early wolves were all smaller and jackal-like, and its appearance and adaptations are of the primitive type.

So here we have two species that look like they might just be color phases of the same species but actually are divided by millions of years of evolution. One is a truly primitive member of its lineage. So primitive and basal that its now classified in a different genus (Lupullela). The other came from a more derived source that evolved parallel characteristics with the primitive one.

Parallel evolution is a hell of a thing, especially when it comes to canids. So much of this parallel evolution has been missed in paleontology and in the conventional methods of taxonomy that use only morphology. Not recognizing the parallel evolution issues is why we didn’t notice that coyotes and gray wolves were much more closely related than we ever could have imagined. It’s also why we thought bush dog belonged with the dhole and African wild dog, just because their teeth are so similar, and it is also why an affinity has been suggested between crab-eating foxes and raccoon dogs, even though they are in entirely different lineages. It is also why there was a suggestion that red wolves represent an ancient lineage of North American wolves, when they are now probably hybrids between coyotes and gray wolves.